Exiles in the Garden
By Ward Just

Photographer Alec Malone is losing sight in his right eye, and he’s about to lose his elderly father. Senator Malone served nine terms, worshipped Franklin D. Roosevelt, and has never understood his only child. Given to reverie and moved by beauty, Alec falls instantly in love with Lucia, a Czech.

Another Look at . . . Marilyn French
By Donna Seaman

“Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath.” The year is 1968. Everything seems to be changing, and Mira Ward, a newly divorced suburban mother of two, has gone back to school at age 38, where she feels painfully out of place. So begins The Women’s Room, a novel by Marilyn French published in 1977. A book, as Gloria Steinem observed, that was to the women’s movement what Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was to civil rights.

Readers’ Advisory Corner: Sarah Statz Cords’ The Inside Scoop: A Guide to Nonfiction Investigative Writing and Exposes
By Mary Ellen Quinn

Editor’s note: The Readers’ Advisory Corner of Booklist’s Professional Reading section highlights titles of particular interest to readers’-advisory librarians.

Following up on the success of The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests (2006), Cords digs deeper into books for which “research was done and someone was talked to.” This sounds a lot like journalism. As Cords explains in her introduction, however, she decided on the term investigative writing because journalism doesn’t really describe the very broad swathe of nonfiction she covers here, encompassing works from David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine to Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One Minute Manager.

Off the Shelf: Reference Universe
By Sue Polanka

One of my favorite things about being a reference librarian is the reference collection. I love perusing the subject encyclopedias for unique content and enjoy watching my collection grow, both in print and e-book formats. However, I find it difficult to keep up with the resources in this valuable collection. Luckily, I found a tool that not only helps me remember these great titles but unlocks them for me, exposing articles and ideas I may not have considered. My tool is Reference Universe, from Paratext, an index to the articles inside the reference collection, providing access points not found in traditional title and subject headings of the OPAC.